

Assistive Technologies devices and systems aim to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities by providing a wide range of assistive services. The AsTeRICS framework provides a Runtime Environment and a toolset that can be highly adapted to the changing needs of each individual and targets to reduce time, effort and costs of developing assistive applications. A key limitation of the platform, as well as similar platforms, is that the integration of accessibility features into existing software applications is difficult due to heterogeneous implementation technologies. Moreover, the capabilities offered by sensors, actuators and other mobile devices deployed on different machines cannot be exploited for the development of AT applications. This paper presents substantial improvements and changes to the Runtime Environment that address these issues and offer the capability to integrate applications built with different technologies and thus to improve the accessibility of an application. In fact, the middleware environment enables to rapidly re-engineer existing software applications. Two examples are re-developed in this work, the “FlashWords” and “EURO” applications, which are extended in a way so that they can also be used by children with motor disabilities.